Who Makes the Nazis?

Lyrics

Who makes the Nazis?
Balding smug faggots
Intellectual half-wits
All the Os

Who makes the Nazis?
The Nazis are long horn
Long horn breed
Long horn--Long horn breed
Long horns--Long horn breed (4)

Who makes the Nazis?

Remember when I used to follow you home from school babe?
Before I got picked up for paedophilia (5)

Who makes the Nazis?
Motels like three split-level mirages (6)
Who makes the Nazis?
Buffalo lips on toast, smiling (7)
Who makes the Nazis?
I put a finger on the weird.
This was real Irish, no Joe;
Was then good as gold
And told of the rapists in the Spa Motel. (8)
The real mould.

Notes

1. Lyrically, this is a wild one, and seems to demand the question: how much of this is agenda-driven? If the lyrics are mostly trying to make a point, lyrics like "Buffalo lips smiling on toast" become particularly hard to assimilate. But lurking in here somewhere there is probably the idea that phenomena like Naziism are more closely related to the banalities of middle-class culture than is sometimes thought. Or something like that. On the other hand, the point may be that everyone makes the Nazis.

Paul Hanley (Have a Bleedin Guess) points out:

With a title as strong as 'Who Makes The Nazis?' there's a temptation to view every line of the lyric as somehow directly related to answering the question. But assuming such preciseness of meaning is often a mistake with Mark's lyrics, and it's particularly dangerous here.

Smithers points out that the title in German would be "Wer Macht die Nazis?" which contains a pun on "Wehrmacht," which was the designation of the German armed forces during World War II ("defense forces").

Paul Hanley, Have a Bleedin Guess (p.133):

... composed by Mark on the open strings of his plastic four-string guitar, which was tuned to something approaching standard bass guitar tuning.

2. Since we only get two legible examples of who the "Os" are here it is difficult to identify what they have in common. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that "Spermo" is not a familiar epithet. "Spermo-" is a combining form for the word "sperm," but it generally only appears in pretty technical contexts. Perhaps a spermo is some kind of sex maniac, in which case those who cannot control their passions make the Nazis (this would also cover winos). Or a repressed sex maniac, who sublimates his sexual urges... who the hell knows. The former seems more likely to me, as it is "who makes the Nazis" rather than "who are the nazis," and to the extent the song is making a coherent conceptual point, it seems to point up this distinction. However, I'm not convinced the song is trying very hard to make a coherent conceptual point.

3. This isn't the usual nickname for television, but that seems to be what is meant here. John Howard points out that this sounds a bit like "Tel Aviv," which may have no significance at all but it worth noting.

4. Although not technically longhorns, the most likely allusion here is to Heck cattle. Heck cattle were a result of an experiment by Lutz and Heinz Heck in Germany intended to retroactively breed back the aurochs, the descendant of all domestic cattle. Although the breeding apparently began in the 1920s, Hitler embraced the project. An attempt like this to bring back a wilder and more powerful animal was clearly in line with the Nazis' distorted appropriation of Nietzschean ideas, and represented a symbolic break with what Hitler saw as a small-spirited and domesticated bourgeois European culture. The result was just a new breed of cattle, not an aurochs. Thus, we might possibly see Heck cattle as a symbolic confluence of violent ideas and the banal reality which fosters them, which may be one of the themes of this song, hard as it is to interpret. On the other hand, The Story of the Fall claims this song was "inspired by the experience of touring Americky," so maybe Texas Longhorns are meant.

Mike points out that in Wagner's opera The Ring of the Nibelungs Viking characters wear horned helmets, although this is historically inaccurate. Wagner was adopted by the Nazis as a kind of forefather, due his nationalistic and anti-semitic views.

Although I do not know that MES was familiar with it, an analogy made by the 20th Century white supremacist Revilo P Oliver is also possibly a source for this (submitted by ShumanTheHuman). Oliver compared Aryans to longhorn cattle who were being bred into tamer, weaker strains like the Black Angus (he saw the Jews as largely responsible for this).

5. Dan points out that this line may be meant to humorously echo Big Star's "Thirteen," which runs "Won't you let me walk you home from school/Won't you let me meet you at the pool."
After a little searching, Dan has turned up information which makes this connection seem likely. In Dan's words:

"I cited the 'picked up for paedophilia' line above as a jokey reference to the Big Star song 'Thirteen.' It may have been more than that.

I've been pushing this a bit further, bearing in mind the idea that perhaps some of the lyrics to this song refer to The Fall's trip to the United States in May-July 1981. 'Who Makes the Nazis' was debuted in September that year, and appeared on record for the first time the following March, on Hex. The Reformation! site says that lyrically it was more or less intact from its first outing. So it checks out chronologically.

Big Star, of course, featured eccentric guitar-pop genius Alex Chilton. In the late 1970s/early 1980s, Chilton was playing with Tav Falco in the Panther Burns (formed in 1979,) who we know MES met on the 1981 tour of the US, and who were label-mates of The Fall.

According to Simon Ford's book Hip Priest (p96):

'Whereas on the last trip Smith had hooked up with the LA underground, on this trip he enjoyed the company of the Memphis scene and more specifically the Panther Burns led by Tav Falco and ex-Big Star guitarist Alex Chilton.'

So maybe MES met Alex Chilton, with the rest of the Panther Burns. I think he was still playing with them regularly then. But he certainly met people who knew Alex Chilton well. So the echoes of Big Star look deliberate.

'Chilton records his most coherent solo effort, Like Flies On Sherbert, in 1979, with Dickinson again at the controls. One journalist describes it as "like the Sun sessions produced by Brian Eno." Chilton goes on to work with psychobilly rebels The Cramps, who enhance his bad-boy rep by regaling the music press with tales of him being chased over state lines by angry fathers whose teenage daughters he’d deflowered.
One unreleased track which offers an insight into Chilton’s state of mind at the time is "Riding Through The Reich." A ghastly account of Nazi malice sung to the tune of "Jingle Bells," he performs it live on Austin radio station KUT: "Riding through the Reich/In a big Mercedes Benz/Killing lots of Kikes/Making lots of friends/Rat a tat tat tat/Mow the bastards down/Oh, what fun it is to have the Nazis back in town."'

[Chilton claimed that those lyrics to "Riding through the Reich", referred to above, were found among the papers of Frederick Cowan, a Nazi who shot 10 people in a shooting spree in New Rochelle, New York, on 14 February 1977. Six people died.]

And then I read this from New Statesman, 3 September 2001 - i.e. well before Chilton's death]:

'Chilton, I now realise, is a man who has an unpleasant fixation with the sexuality of young girls. Chilton has always defended his song "Thirteen," which is about being obsessed with a girl of that age, by saying it was written from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy. So why, at a gig in 1993, did he choose to dedicate it to Michael Jackson? Was he also adopting a child's perspective the other week when he sang a song called "Patti Girl," whose subject is "only 12 years old," and another called "Hot Thing," about a girl who's "too young to go steady?" And what was he up to when he recently released a solo album called Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy?'

What, indeed...?

From A Man Called Destruction, biography of Alex Chilton:

'He'd just written a new song, "Hey! Little Child," inspired by the high school girls who flocked to Panther Burns gigs... "A lot of those people were dating underage girls," says Kent Benjamin. "And you see that in so many of Alex's songs, like 'Hey! Little Child'. The [Chilton] house on Harbert was not far from this Catholic girls' school, and Alex's big thing was to go sit on the curb there when all the young girls with their Catholic school uniforms walked by."'

p.237.

On the other hand, nairng points out that "the practice of accompanying a girl home from school is a common idea in rock n roll lyrics, I find. A notable example is Larry Williams's "Slow Down," which was covered by Liverpool band The Beatles: "I used to walk you home, baby, after school, carry your books home, too." I feel that the lyric here may be referencing that cliche and highlighting its obvious creepiness, given many r'n'r stars' predilection for younger sexual partners (e.g. Jerry Lee Lewis abducting & marrying his then 13-year-old cousin) without any necessary reference to Big Star / Alex Chilton. At any rate, I can't see any direct reference to the Big Star lyric; there must be many of similar lines in the works of Fats Domino, for example, and other r'n'r types."

Note also "Good Morning Little School Girl" and "Gloria" make use of this questionable trope...

6. Based on the following from Dan, we must conclude it is likely that either MES got this phrase ("split-level mirages," a pun on "split-level garages") from a poet, they both have it from an independent source, or it is a known phrase:

A similar phrase appears in the work of the poet Laurel Ann Bogen, specifically her "I coulda been a contender." It includes the following: "l got it back pug-scrappy/l almost tossed out the frenzy and the cockroaches/For a split-level mirage of dubious companionship." This is collected in a few places: Bogen's anthologies The Night Grows Teeth and Other Observations (1980) and The Burning: New and Selected Poems, 1970-1990 (1991), and also in The Maverick Poets: an Anthology, edited by Steve Kowit (1988). Obviously I don't know if MES read Bogen, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But like with "Odeon sky," the unusualness of the phrase makes me wonder if the concept of a split mirage or split-level mirage has some kind of real-world salience.

7. Dan has found a reference to an actual beef dish called "Buffalo Lips," but it seems to be pretty rare, as I can't find any information on it on the internet. George has a plausible explanation: "I always thought that the buffalo lips on toast line was a reference to the massacre of the buffalo as a means of wiping out the native Americans. Hitler admired the way the white settlers in America wiped out most of the native population."

Robert points out that this might just mean a hamburger, referring to a quote to that effect which Dan runs down and critiques:

Here's the quote from Brian Edge's Paintwork (p.52):

As Fall product, it [Hex] was exactly what we had come to expect, a musical flux rife with vivid images like 'buffalo lips on toast, smiling' (a hamburger) from 'Who Makes The Nazis?'

And he might be right. But he might not be. The case against is: that there is a dish called "buffalo lips", which consists of, er, buffalo lips; that a hamburger is usually made of beef, rather than buffalo, so unless this was a burger made of buffalo meat (which it could be) the "vividness" of the imagery is undermined by the inaccuracy of the description; hamburgers are not "on toast," but in a bun. But alright, I know, it's poetry.

8. SkirikingFucker (blame his/her mother, not me!) says there is a famous hotel near Dublin called the "Spa Hotel." But in researching this possibility, what I have discovered is that there is a genre of hotels called "spa hotels" so it is quite difficult to narrow it down to one. In any case there is one near Dublin called The Lucan Spa Hotel which may be the one s/he's thinking of, and we did just get the "real Irish" line (the proper reading of which is a whole other question).

This is an allusion to the UK soap opera 'Crossroads', which isn't on any more. In the late 70s and early 80s, one of the show's best known characters was Benny Hawkins (Paul Henry), a sort of gentle-giant simpleton figure who always wore a woolly hat. He was meant to be pathetic, and was regularly used as a punching-bag for fortune - he was illiterate, his girlfriend got killed off, a Mrs Prewitt made him sleep in a garden shed, and for a while he was blinded. When his eyes were being examined, he said to the doctor 'I can't see nothing, doctor... only cobwebs!'

nairng pipes up:

"In MR James's story 'The Tractate Middoth' (which sounds very much like a Fall title to me) a ghostly figure in the library thwarts the finding of the eponymous book, and is described by the librarian thusly: 'the eyes were very deep-sunk; and over them, from the eyebrows to the cheek-bone, there were cobwebs--thick.'"

Dan says that "cobweb eye" is a colloquial handle for blurred vision, or, from what I can find on the internet, seeing "floaters." I had never heard of it. So this is one of those times when MES seems (to me, at least) to be at his most surrealist and opaque, and he turns out to be perhaps saying something rather mundane.

Recently Mark E. Smith was asked if any of his lyrics now make him cringe, and he picked this line...an odd choice, it doesn't seem particularly like a clunker.

10. Orwell of course fought against the Nazi-supported Franco regime in Spain in the 1930s. Orwell was also a member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. Despite his role there, he was a critic of British imperialism and drew upon his experiences with the Burmese police in his later writings in a way that can be summed up in his famous quote "when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys."

12. Courtesy of the Lyrics Parade (as the typographical oddities are in the book, I left it as is):

Note: The following are some notes from MES's diary dated January 26 (1982?) from the Lough book that bear on this song:

A necklace fur coated poodle over
Black burnt flesh\
Hark hark
Crack unit species
Who makes the Nazis?
I'd put a finger on the
weird. This was real Irish
know. Joe was then good
as gold + told of the rapist
in the Spa Motel
The real mould.
Remember when I used to follow you
home from school babe?
Stick some paper under
the door at 8 pm.
Rest room.
Motels like 3 split mirages who makes the Nazis?
Benny's cobweb eyes
Met some eyes in a dirty goods
shop/mutual recognition of
hard man crack/bllur
blur retreat
Who makes the Nazis?

Pre-cog?: See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilina_Vlas (known as a spa motel if you google it).

4.Mark | 21/05/2014

The "Bush monkeys" line is sung by Steve Hanley, I think.

5.Mr. Marshall | 06/06/2014

The bush monkeys is a reference to blacks..."when you're out of" to "bush monkeys" is meant to be a racist talking.

6.bzfgt | 15/06/2014

Do you have a reference to that usage of "bush monkey"? It certainly sounds like a racist epithet but I don't recall hearing that one and I can't raise an instance of it on the internet.

7.bzfgt | 15/06/2014

The stanza is preceded by "Here's a word from Bobby," and if anyone has an idea who that might refer to in this sense that could be a clue.

8.bzfgt | 15/06/2014

In this "case," I meant.

Who is Bobby? I thought of Bobby Seale for some reason although that would mean the first two lines were his and "murder all bush monkeys" someone else's, if the racist angle is right. Anyway, I have no reason to think it is he, but I have been trying to Google the stanza or individual lines or words thereof with "Bobby," so if anyone can think of any Bobbys it might be it could yield something with some strategic Googling.

9.dannyno | 29/06/2014

I cited the "picked up for paedophilia" line above as a jokey reference to the Big Star song "Thirteen". It may have been more than that.

I've been pushing this a bit further, bearing in mind the idea that perhaps some of the lyrics to this song refer to The Fall's trip to the United States in May-July 1981. "Who Makes the Nazis" was debuted in September that year, and appeared on record for the first time the following March, on Hex. The Reformation! site says that lyrically it more or less intact from its first outing. So it checks out chronologically.

Big Star, of course, featured eccentric guitar-pop genius Alex Chilton. In the late 1970s/early 1980s, Chilton was playing with Tav Falco in the Panther Burns (formed 1979) who we know MES met on the 1981 tour of the US, and who were label-mates of The Fall.

According to Simon Ford's book "Hip Priest" (p96):

"Whereas on the last trip Smith had hooked up with the LA underground, on this trip he enjoyed the company of the Memphis scene and more specifically the Panther Burns led by Tav Falco and ex-Big Star guitarist Alex Chilton."

The Fall were in Memphis some time around 20 June 1981.

See: http://www.jneomarvin.com/interviews/the-fall-unpublished-1981

"MES: Looks like a member of the Panther Burns. (Laughs)

JNM: Oh yeah, I've heard of them. Did you play with them?

MES: No, but we met them in Memphis."

So maybe MES met Alex Chilton, with the rest of the Panther Burns. I think he was still playing with them regularly then. But he certainly met people who knew Alex Chilton well. So the echoes of Big Star look deliberate.

I also read this article:
http://www.uncut.co.uk/big-star/big-star-whats-going-ahn-feature

Which says:

"Chilton records his most coherent solo effort, Like Flies On Sherbert, in 1979, with Dickinson again at the controls. One journalist describes it as “like the Sun sessions produced by Brian Eno”. Chilton goes on to work with psychobilly rebels The Cramps, who enhance his bad-boy rep by regaling the music press with tales of him being chased over state lines by angry fathers whose teenage daughters he’d deflowered.
One unreleased track which offers an insight into Chilton’s state of mind at the time is “Riding Through The Reich”. A ghastly account of Nazi malice sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells”, he performs it live on Austin radio station KUT: “Riding through the Reich/In a big Mercedes Benz/Killing lots of Kikes/Making lots of friends/Rat a tat tat tat/Mow the bastards down/Oh, what fun it is to have the Nazis back in town.”"

And then I read this article:
http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=21220
[New Statesman, 3 September 2001 - i.e. well before Chilton's death]:

"Chilton, I now realise, is a man who has an unpleasant fixation with the sexuality of young girls. Chilton has always defended his song 'Thirteen', which is about being obsessed with a girl of that age, by saying it was written from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy. So why, at a gig in 1993, did he choose to dedicate it to Michael Jackson? Was he also adopting a child's perspective the other week when he sang a song called 'Patti Girl', whose subject is 'only 12 years old', and another called 'Hot Thing', about a girl who's 'too young to go steady'? And what was he up to when he recently released a solo album called Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy?"

What indeed...

Dan

10.dannyno | 29/06/2014

Chilton turned 31 in December 1981, so unfortunately there "29 years old" reference can't be directly linked to him (unless MES got it wrong, which is possible).

From "A Man Called Destruction", biography of Alex Chilton:

"He'd just written a new song, 'Hey! Little Child', inspired by the high school girls who flocked to Panther Burns gigs... 'A lot of those people were dating underage girls,' says Kent Benjamin. 'And you see that in so many of Alex's songs, like 'Hey! Little Child'. The [Chilton] house on Harbert was not far from this Catholic girls' school, and Alex's big thing was to go sit on the curb there when all the young girls with their Catholic school uniforms walked by."

p.237.

11.dannyno | 29/06/2014

Chilton claimed that those lyrics to "Riding through the Reich", referred to above, were found among the papers of Frederick Cowan, a Nazi who shot 10 people in a shooting spree in New Rochelle, New York, on 14 February 1977. Six people died.

12.dannyno | 29/06/2014

I've not seen it stated explicitly, but obviously "buffalo lips" is a beef dish.

Well, could be. Except that buffalo lips is an actual beef product that exists and you can buy and eat. So, we don't need to think of it as a metaphor.

16.dannyno | 22/07/2014

Sounds like "R 'n' R badges", not "Arena badges"

17.Stephen Parkin | 08/10/2014

Not necessarily to defend Alex Chilton, but at least one song called "Loose Shoes" is a riposte to a comment by the NC Republican Earl Butz, who once said: "I'll tell you what the coloreds want. It's three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit." The song is a nice Louis Jordan/Cab Calloway type parody; it's on Youtube

18.Stephen Parkin | 08/10/2014

Sounds like "R 'n' R badges", not "Arena badges"

I'd have thought that's more likely to be RAR badges - "Rock Against Racism," such as Smith is wearing in at least one very early onstage photograph.

19.dannyno | 03/11/2014

Could be, but I'm not sure about "more likely". RAR was on the way out in 1981, and MES hadn't worn any such badges for years at that point. On the other hand RAR would fit very nicely a song called "Who Makes the Nazis"!

But having just listened to the line again, it still sounds like "R n R" rather than RAR.

20.dannyno | 05/06/2016

"Cobweb eye"

.. is of course a semi-medical term for a form of blurred vision.

Anyway, the episode of Crossroads where Benny was the victim of a hit and run was first aired on 15 June 1981.

21.bzfgt | 29/06/2016

"Of course"? I've never heard that.

22.dannyno | 08/08/2016

"Motels like three split-level mirages"

This phrase "split level mirage" or "split mirage". It feels like it's an actual thing, but what it is, I don't know.

However, a similar phrase appears in the work of the poet Laurel Ann Bogen, specifically her "I coulda been a contender". It includes the following:

l got it back
pug-scrappy
l almost tossed out
the frenzy and the cockroaches
for a split-level mirage
of dubious companionship

This is collected in a few places, Bogen's anthologies "The Night Grows Teeth and other observations" (1980) and "The Burning: new and selected poems, 1970-1990" (1991), and also in "The Maverick Poets: an anthology", edited by Steve Kowit (1988).

Obviously I don't know if MES read Bogen, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But like with "Odeon sky", the unusualness of the phrase makes me wonder if the concept of a split mirage or split-level mirage has some kind of real-world salience.

23.dannyno | 08/08/2016

I could kind of understand it as a metaphor, like "split-level" homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-level_home. I'm feeling that split-level-ness is representative of something or other.

24.bzfgt | 25/08/2016

I couldn't raise a copy of the poem online, so I guessed at the enjambment--let me know if it's wrong.

25.bzfgt | 25/08/2016

23: well, split-level homes would be an obvious symbol of bourgeois banality, and in some respects this could be pegged as a "mirage"--the bourgeois dream of complacent, guiltless living when they're actually "making the nazis," that sort of thing...

26.dannyno | 16/10/2016

"paedophelia"

Typo!

27.JOHN FUN | 19/10/2016

Split-level garage is a common thing. Garage rhymes with mirage.

28.bzfgt | 21/10/2016

Right, John--sometimes something is not said but it seems so clear I feel like it has, and this is one such case. It didn't occur to me to spell that out but of course that is the pun, so I'll fix it up.

29.dannyno | 22/10/2016

"Garage rhymes with mirage"

Well, hang on, only if you pronounce "garage" as "garraj". But i don't pronounce it that way, I pronounce it "garridge". Hard vowels.

So the question is, how would MES pronounce it?

30.bzfgt | 29/10/2016

Yeah, English people do not cotton to European pronunciations, I've noticed this!

(Freudian typo? when I looked at this, I had typed "I notcied this!")

31.Sarah Bond | 15/11/2016

Do you think Long Horn Breed might represent Moloch or Ba'al worshipers, there seems to be a lot amongst the elite classes?

32.dan melchior | 17/11/2016

I always took the pedophile line as a reference to the song 'little girl' by them. This seems a much more likely thing for mes to listen to than big star.
'I passed by your classroom
Just had to take a look
And I watched, looked
What you had writ' in your book
'Cause I love ya
And I don't care, what they say
I don't care what, what they say'
Creepy stuff.

33.bzfgt | 24/11/2016

It's possible there's some kind of secondary allusion going on with "Longhorn breed," but as there is no evidence that would be strictly for the comment section...there could be any number of meanings if we start in on that sort of thing. I'm not sure what you mean about Ba`al worship among the elite, but you're not another pseudonym of a different commenter, are you? There's someone who goes in for that sort of thing who posts here from time to time....

34.SkrikingFucker | 25/11/2016

There's a famous hotel just outside of Dublin called the Spa Hotel, maybe MES was told a story about a murder there by the "Irish Joe" ?

35.bzfgt | 21/12/2016

Sometimes, even though I inherited thousands of words from the LP, I am amazed that there is something that sticks around for so long without an investigation, such as the following:

This was real Irish know.
Joe was then good as gold

At a minimum the enjambment is badly chosen here. It is either "This is real Irish, no Joe" or "This is real Irish know, Joe." Neither make a lot of sense to me but "This is real Irish know" makes less so I wonder if "no Joe" can mean anything in this context? Irish coffee, not a mere cup of "Joe""? Who the hell knows. But I'm going with "no Joe" unless there's a case for the other, at least it seems to have the potential to make sense.

SkrikingFucker, is it the Lucan hotel mentioned above in my revised note of which you are thinking? One thing about this gig, I'm always being told about famous thises and well-known thats about which I can find little record, and if it's not that one it can't be all that famous...

I wonder if this is a reference to Saul Galpern, of Kamera records, who of course put out Hex. Galpern went on to found Nude Records, who had a lot of success with Suede. The Suede B-side Implement Yeah!, which is about MES, includes the line "That boy Smith called Saul a Scotch homo", which I always suspected was Brett Anderson using an anecdote that Galpern had told him about the old days. I don't know if Galpern is gay, but if so, all this fits together, especially with MES's usual attitude to the people running his record companies. The "balding" may well have been true at the time - certainly is now, if you check this interview from a few years back (which includes a great story of how he almost signed The Fall to Nude, sabotaged by some typical MES behaviour).

I actually hope I'm wrong about this (so anyone with any contradictory ideas please chip in), because the tone makes this almost as problematic as "Where are the obligatory...".

I met Saul Galpern once in the mid 90s. Nude had the office above one that I was visiting, and he invited my wife and I up with someone from the downstairs office to watch the video for Suede's The Wild Ones which had just been finished. It's still (probably) my favourite Suede song, and Saul was lovely and friendly.

39.SkrikingFucker | 01/02/2017

The Lucan Spa Hotel it is. It is very well known in Ireland, you would have passed it coming into Dublin from "de country" before motorways. It would have been a landmark basically.

As well as the Beckett reference mentioned above, I have seen it referenced in passing in a lot of Irish literature. Was reading Langrishe, Go Down by Aidan Higgins the other day where it was mentioned, reminded me to come back here!

40.bzfgt | 11/02/2017

Interesting stuff, Ian! The link doesn't work for me, however...

41.dannyno | 23/02/2017

Comment #38. Reference to Saul Galpern?

It's not impossible, given the Suede parody lyric, but I also think you can fit lots of lines to real people by ripping them out of context (although admittedly it is not unknown for MES to shove lines into songs out of context!). But MES was well disposed towards Kamera and in interviews has always expressed regret about having to leave the label. And it also seems a bit incongruous given the rest of the lyrics.

From interview with Kay Carroll in Simon Ford's Hip Priest (p95):

'Mark and I went to Saul's home and hung out with him,' said Carroll. 'I think Versa introduced him to me. We were his first band on the Kamera label and although he appeared to be a bit of a "Jack the Lad" character I remember Mark liked him.'

Hip Priest records a less positive view of Galpern when he was running Nude. The Fall considered signing, but MES was mistrustful because of the failure of Kamera, and also because the only chair in Galpern's office was his own. But of course that's years down the line.

You worked with The Fall AND Simply Red. Didn’t you find something odd about this combination?

Not really. Both from Manchester and maybe took very different paths but both socialists to start with but yes very different musically – Hucknall did have bona-fide punk credentials though which people may not be aware of and his know-all of music was phenomenal – he had a genuine passion and amazing knowledge for Jamaican dub and those great Reggae singers which I loved as I too was a fan of a lot of Reggae from the late 70’s period…undeniably he is just a great singer and that début still stands up for me – for the times !

Mark E Smith is The Fall and there is no one quite like them – then and now. I remember around ’94 both Brett & Justine Frischmann (Elastica) telling me that I had to sign him when I was in the middle of Nude’s success – I got him down for a meeting but he told me some story about Mani from the Roses stealing the demos while he was sitting on the train coming down from Manchester. He turned up for the meeting with Gillian from New Order so it was all quite surreal and he only wanted to conduct the meeting in the pub. I’d loved to have put that record out on Nude at the time.

43.bzfgt | 25/02/2017

Ha, I like that chair thing though...it manages to be funny about both men at once.

44.nairng | 24/04/2017

I may have missed it, but I can't see that anyone has pointed out the MR James reference w/r/t the cobweb eyes? In his story The Tractate Middoth (which sounds very much like a Fall title to me) a ghostly figure in the library prevents the location of the eponymous book, and is described by the librarian thusly: "the eyes were very deep-sunk; and over them, from the eyebrows to the cheek-bone, there were cobwebs - thick." This is not to deny any Crossroads reference, but it seems unlikely that MES would not here be consciously referencing his beloved MR James.

Incidentally, the practice of accompanying a girl home from school is a common idea in rock n roll lyrics, I find. A notable example is Larry Williams's Slow Down, which was covered by Liverpool band The Beatles: "I used to walk you home, baby, after school, carry your books home, too." I feel that the lyric here may be referencing that cliche and highlighting its obvious creepiness, given many r'n'r stars' prediliction for younger sexual partners (eg Jerry Lee Lewis abducting & marrying his then 13-year old cousin) without any necessary reference to Big Star / Alex Chilton. At any rate, I can't see any direct reference to the Big Star lyric; there must be many of similar lines in the works of Fats Domino, for example, and other r'n'r types.

Hey bzfgt, nairng piping up again...
I meant the location of the book - i.e. the finding of it - was prevented...location as in the act of locating sth, not the place where it is located...does that make sense??
It's a good story if you've not read it, btw!

I am pretty sure I have read it, is that the one where the ghost is originally in the book? Or am I thinking of something else? There's one by him where the book itself is the source of the haunting.

49.dannyno | 03/07/2017

dan melchior in comment #32 is skeptical that MES would listen to Big Star. But there is evidence that MES did listen to Big Star.

NME, 29 Feb 1992:

We buy another drink and Mark says; "The thing about this business is that there's too many bloody guitar bands." The last two words twist out of Mark's mouth like he was a licensed taxi driver moaning that there's too many mini-cabs on the road. I tell him that too many guitar bands try to sound old when the groups they idolise were trying to sound like the most modern thing in the world.

"Ha ha! They're talkin' about Big Star and stuff that I outgrew when I was 18. They think going like this (Mark grimaces in the gestures of an orgasmic guitar solo) is cool.

Ha! But, note that by "Fall Sound" he was mocking the "'Guitar is Dead' mob"...

51.15936829472 | 22/11/2017

The cobweb simile for floaters does seem to be a common in the US judging by its use on this government website. So perhaps something MES heard on tour and thought strange, rather than picked up from a UK regional dialect or, em, Crossroads...
https://nei.nih.gov/health/floaters/floaters

Then again, maybe the National Eye Institute of America is a hotbed of Fall fans.

52.dannyno | 26/11/2017

It's too big a coincidence for "Benny's cobweb eyes" not to be taken from Crossroads. We'd need to watch the episodes to confirm. On the other hand, if MES picked up on the phrase on tour, and then heard it used, or saw how it could be used, on Crossroads...

53.Mike | 01/12/2017

'Longhorn' may refer to that Nazi love of Wagner. Wager's operas had a lot of sentimental Viking references and it used to be thought that the Vikings wore horned helmets (since disproved)...

54.Mike Watts | 01/12/2017

All the 'O's... I know this thought is a bit tenuous as he actually pronounces it 'Oh', but I wonder if he was looking at O in a similar way to 0, by which I mean the letter O and the figure 0...

Mike, actually I think you may be on to something there, which I hadn't thought of. Maybe not in Britain, I wonder, but if I was telling you my phone number and it had 205 in it, for instance, I'd likely say "two oh five"...no, that can't be just American, everyone does that, don't they?

Are you the Mike of 53? Interesting thought, I know exactly the Wagnerian helmets you mean...

56.Dr X O'Skeleton | 07/12/2017

I always took "Benny's cobweb eyes" to be a reference to benzedrine, a popular type of speed. Not sure how the cobwebs come in. Optical hallucinations due to lack of sleep? Or eyes not closed for so long there are cobwebs now? Or something about the appearance of the eyes in habitual users?

57.dannyno | 07/12/2017

Dr X O'Skeleton, comment #56. ... why did you always take it to be a reference to benzedrine?

58.Pinkpapaver | 21/02/2018

Buffalo lips may also allude to beef curtains... An affectionate term for labia.

Spa motel may also be referencing the crossroads motel. (TV) /penns Hall /Ramada Hotel. (the actual real hotel setting) which is next to a church of matter day saints.
All things to all people.
Smith knew the tarot well enough to know that whatever needs to pop up in a person's mind after some image or word trigger is what needs to pop up coz there are no coincidences.
So much truth beyond truth.

Yeah, I think there's a lot to that tarot comment re:MES's approach to lyrics.

60.George | 12/05/2018

I always thought that the buffalo lips on toast line was a reference to the massacre of the buffalo as a means of wiping out the native Americans. Hitler admired the way the white settlers in America wiped out most of the native population.

This was in the Brian Edge book about the band. IIRC when talking about Hex and the development of Smith's unique writing he says that this is the singer's poetic way of describing a hamburger.

63.dannyno | 03/01/2019

comment 62: I think this is probably the most conventional interpretation of the line, surprising that it's not in the notes.

Here's the quote from Brian Edge's Paintwork (p.52):

As Fall product, it [Hex] was exactly what we had come to expect, a musical flux rife with vivid images like 'buffalo lips on toast, smiling' (a hamburger) from 'Who Makes The Nazis?'

And he might be right. But he might not be. The case against is: that there is a dish called "buffalo lips", which consists of, er, buffalo lips; that a hamburger is usually made of beef, rather than buffalo, so unless this was a burger made of buffalo meat (which it could be) the "vividness" of the imagery is undermined by the inaccuracy of the description; hamburgers are not "on toast", but in a bun. But alright, I know, it's poetry.

64.Robert | 06/01/2019

Absolutely. I should have stressed that the Brian Edge quote is just one interpretation. I thought it was worth adding here. Thanks for the actual quote.

65.Robert | 06/01/2019

Having visited the USA at that point, it is not unlikely that MES would have encountered a buffalo burger.

I take the song as saying that Nazi's are created by banality and referring to them as a longhorn is calling them cattle, dumb, to be corralled, slaughtered etc. The bush monkey line is a slur, but plainly it is part of the Nazi attitude, (spoken by "Bobby" a cop perhaps?).

I don't know that I would call it anti-semitic, but his implication that Isreal helps makes the Nazis has always bummed me out.

From the view of a german native speaker the term 'bush monkey' is quite obviously related to a german racist swear word used for black / coloured people. ("Buschaffe")

It's basicall a literal translation.

The line '29 year old' might refer to AH who was 29 years old in 1918 when Germany lost world war I.

73.dannyno | 16/04/2019

John Howard, comment #71. Mm, alike but not identical. I hear "Tele-V". To the extent there's any serious analysis of the origins of Nazism, or Neo-Nazism, in the lyric (which there really isn't), there's no sense that he's aiming at geopolitical targets (and he doesn't seem to have ever had a particular political stance against Israel - not surprising perhaps given his Prestwich upbringing and his later gigs in Israel).

John Howard #71: yes, they do sound alike, it's Tele-V which sounds like Tel Aviv.

76.Robert | 30/04/2019

On the Peel session version he very clearly says "Tele-V" (and more than once).

77.Smithers | 05/06/2019

I'm new, so sorry if this has already been mentioned or is already apparent.

I've read so much Fall-related stuff that I'm not sure if this is actually my idea or something that I've read elsewhere, but as I'm learning German I noticed that the title of the song reveals a pun when translated - 'Wer macht die Nazis?', leading to 'Wehrmacht' - the name of the Nazi army (also mentioned in 'Middle Mass').

This song is about Joy Division, their flirtation with Nazi imagery (see cover of Ideal For Living EP) and their resultant reputation. The drumming is Karl Burns's version of Stephen Morris's drumming for Joy Division and there's a voice low down in the mix chanting "IAN" repeatedly.

Who makes the Nazis?
Intellectual half-wits.

is a slam against Joy Division's fans at the time.

80.dannyno | 15/06/2019

Comment #79: ho ho ho. Classic unfunny disinformation nonsense.

This song didn't debut until September 1981, by which time Ian Curtis had been dead for over a year and three months and Joy Division had long been succeeded by New Order.

81.Duncan | 17/06/2019

Comment #80:

Joy Division still had fans in 1981, much in the same way there are still fans of the band now in 2019 nearly 30 years after Ian Curtis's death. Many original fans of the band did not like the change of musical direction taken by New Order and preferred the Old Order as preserved on vinyl.

The same year on 16 July 1981 MES mocked Factory records for living "off the back of a dead man" as recorded on the Part of America Therein track Cash and Carry.

The fact that this Hex track was first played at a gig in September 1981 places it firmly in the same period as another song in which MES is making Factory/Ian Curtis jibes some time after the singer's death.

I was 19 and a Fall fan in 1982 when Hex Enduction Hour came out. The references, particularly the drumming style, seemed obvious at the time.

I'm not sure how it seeming obvious to you at the time constitutes any sort of evidence. It's a possibility but I don't see the knock-down case you're implying. It's not clear to me that the backing vocal is saying "Ian"...I don't hear the "n"sound at the end...there has to be more evidence or something before I'd want to move in this direction.

If you're right and I am misguided, it is recorded here now in any case, and some more evidence could turn my head around at some point.

84.dannyno | 22/06/2019

Comment #81:

The same year on 16 July 1981 MES mocked Factory records for living "off the back of a dead man" as recorded on the Part of America Therein track Cash and Carry.

Indeed, but that's a "slam" against Factory for - in MES' eyes - contemporary crimes, not a "slam" against Ian Curtis or Joy Division fans along the lines and in the terms you asserted in comment #79.

85.New Fall Fan | 25/07/2019

I always thought MES was saying "low born breed" instead of "long horn breed." It seemed to suit the song in that the Nazis were targeting those of "low born" status (in their eyes) when in fact it was the type of people who gravitated towards Nazism who were really "low born" (low IQ, inbred genes, etc)

That makes sense but I'm pretty sure it's longhorn...I think I'd read about Heck cattle within the year or two before I first heard the song, always made sense, but I will recheck it. It is sometimes hard to be 100% sure what he's saying...

87.ShumanTheHuman | 28/11/2019

Recently came across a reference to Revilo P Oliver, white supremacist intellectual and rabid antisemite who was too right wing for the John Birch Society, who uses Texas Long-horn cattle as an analogy for Ayrans in the first half of the 20th century
http://www.heretical.com/oliver/js09.html
This would mean it would be wrong to view "Long-horns" as dumb cattle. What they have been replaced by are the docile herd
This article was published posthumously in 2002 and I cannot find a reference to its original publication.
The Long-horn link seems pretty strong but I am struggling to come up with anything else that ties it in.
"Bad Tele-V" may refer to Mossad which is headquartered in Tel Aviv
"Balding smug faggots
Intellectual half-wits" could then be any, or maybe a particular individual or group from the era of composition, leftwing academic or talking head

MES may simply be saying in whose interest is the perpetuation of the notion that the white working class are ripe for extremism?

88.dannyno | 27/12/2019

Paul Hanley, in Have a Bleedin Guess, says the song is based around a riff that MES wrote on his Selco 'New Beat' "toy Beatles guitar" (p.39, and note 26).

89.dannyno | 27/12/2019

Paul Hanley, Have a Bleedin Guess (p.133):

... composed by Mark on the open strings of his plastic four-string guitar, which was tuned to something approaching standard bass guitar tuning.

90.dannyno | 27/12/2019

And again:

With a title as strong as 'Who Makes The Nazis?' there's a temptation to view every line of the lyric as somehow directly related to answering the question. But assuming such preciseness of meaning is often a mistake with Mark's lyrics, and it's particularly dangerous here.

(pp.134-135)

91.Phil | 03/01/2020

Paul Hanley says in his excellent book that "nazi fortress" is a reference to a bbc television centre. Therefore it follows that when M.E.S. asks "Who Makes The Nazis" he is actually asking WHO MAKES TELEVISION? In my opinion a lot of this song content is complaints about rubbish tv programmes.

Excellent comment Phil, do you have a little more context or a quote? I have not yet the book.

94.dannyno | 04/01/2020

I read Phil as extrapolating from what we know of "nazi fortress" = BBC Langham House (which we had already arrived at here at annotated Fall and Hanley confirms in his book). Phil's "Therefore" is his own speculation, not Hanley's. Hanley as per the comment in my comment #90 undermines the notion that the song has a single message re: Nazism.

While I agree with Phil that TV is part of the lyric, I disagree that we can read "Nazi" is synonymous with "Television" across all Fall songs just because of the metaphor in another song. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a Nazi is just a Nazi.

95.thehippriestess | 04/01/2020

The occasional deep "Yeeeeahhh"s that appear in the song are very similar to those that show up as an occasional interjection in "You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here" on "Freak Out" by The Mothers Of Invention.

96.Bob | 15/01/2020

I would guess all the O's would be Irish people 'This was real Irish,' e.g. O'Shaughnassey, O'Brien, O'Casey, O'Connell, O'Donnell.